


Points of Origin

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She swears, on her life, that she will get him out of this. Coming from Natasha, or a person with Natasha’s history, that means quite a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Points of Origin

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not sure if this is more of a Natasha character piece than a shipping piece, but with this pairing I think the two intersect a fair amount. Also posted on Tumblr. 
> 
> This is also the longest one-shot I’ve written in a while, so I hope it’s not too tangential. It’s certainly very dark and violent, in places. Thank you for reading. Any and all feedback is appreciated.

…

Years later, what Natasha will remember most clearly is the sight of his hands.

“Doctor?”

He doesn’t answer. Her head is still bright and weightless from the shock of the explosion, the impact of the fall, which at least draws her attention off the steel beam pinning her down. She can feel a pulse trapped in her throat, behind her eyes, reverberating so hard that her fingertips throb.

She tries again.

“Bruce?”

Shards of glass have caught on the folds of his shirt and within the curls of his hair. His face is shadowed by the equipment room’s dim fluorescent light. His labored breathing sounds coarse inside this closed, narrow space. 

(But that may be her breathing, too. Natasha can’t quite be sure.)

Her voice grows strained. What comes out is a string of empty promises all knotted together, silk scarves drawn from a magician’s mouth, and she only half-understands them herself:  _we’re gonna be okay, we’re gonna be okay, we’re gonna be okay, listen to me._

The muscles of his back seize up as if shot through with an electrical current. She has never, Natasha realizes just then, given careful consideration to how much it must hurt him, each and every time: the uncurling of the spine, the unlocking of joints, the unbraiding of ligaments and muscles as he sheds himself like a husk. It is painful to be unmade.

(Especially from the inside out, as she well knows.)

And there, of course, pressed against the metal grating, are his hands.

They are white-knuckled, gathered into helpless fists, even as his body is pulled apart by the terrible and widening divide between a lack of control and the desire for it.

(A lesson in practical anatomy they taught her, once, along with the location of the carotid and brachial arteries – a clenched fist is about the size of your heart, while two fists together represent the size of your brain. The fist is a good standard of personal measurement. It is a good unit for understanding your strength and frailty, the limits of what you are able to give in service.)

There is a stifled cry. This moment seizes her by the throat, and Natasha beats with her own fist as she talks.

“I swear, on my life,” she hears, “I will get you out of this. You will walk away, and never have to –”

But Natasha will not remember what she had planned to say next, if in fact she had planned to say anything at all.

It probably wouldn’t have mattered.

What does matter, however, is what Bruce says to her, while he is still able to say anything at all:

“ _Your_  life?”

…

_“I assume the whole place is surrounded?”_

_“Just you and me.”_

…

Somewhere within SHIELD’s official file on Natasha Romanoff, pressed between a meticulous tally of her worth in bounty money and a collection of photocopied passports all bearing different names, there is a photograph.

It is about the size of an invitation envelope, a glossy professional print. The date ‘1995’ has been scratched onto its back in red pen. And while nobody has labeled this photograph with a name, nobody has recorded how this piece of evidence was obtained, it is obvious enough who its subject is.

(Although she is still “Natalia” here, properly speaking, a name derived from the Latin  _natale domini_ for “Birthday of the Lord.” So maybe it’s not that obvious after all.)

She stands before a wall-to-wall mirror, alone on a brightly-lacquered floor. Pieces of masking tape mark where older students are expected to begin various brisés and tombés. Cold light from a window creates blue shadows on her skin, shadows in the gauzy folds of a white skirt with stiff pleats like the petals of a daisy.

She wears ballet slippers, feet crossed into the fifth position. Both arms are lifted above her head, fingertips barely touching, and she is thin enough that the hollow underside of her ribcage shows through the satin costume. Her mouth forms a button of concentration. Her gaze fires forward into the lens.

Upon closer inspection, though, an observer may also note the presence of two additional people reflected in that mirror behind her.

They are women, wearing black dresses and what may be pearls around their necks. Their faces are out of focus. They wait against the room’s fleur de lis-papered wall, beside where a photographer crouches with his camera. They are standing by to watch this picture be taken, just as they will stand by and watch whatever happens to her next.

Or whatever is done to her next, rather.

And one of those shadows on Natalia’s face, it should be mentioned, is in fact a bruise; the white talcum they have powdered her with has failed to cover it completely.

(When SHIELD falls apart, and Natasha – someone with an ironic sense of humor has allowed her to keep the name, in one of its further derivations – is advised to eliminate whatever paper trail she can, this photograph is the first and only thing she burns.)

…

_“And your actress buddy, is she a spy too? They start that young?”_

_“I did.”_

…

She keeps herself pressed flat against the floor, one hand holding up a pink dust ruffle. A glowing digital watch informs her, with cats-eye placidity, that it is 5:45 AM.

She has been staring at the girl beneath the bed for a full minute now, and the girl has been staring back.

“Sophia,” the Black Widow says, “Sophia, come out from under there. I’m here to help you.”

Sophia presses herself further back, amongst the unmated shoes and discarded toys. The Black Widow waits for an answer. The bedroom around them is dark, its walls covered in breathing shadows, although a gray pre-dawn light has begun to come from behind the closed muslin curtains. It passes through a stoppered glass bottle on the windowsill, filled with violets and peat moss.

“Sophia?” she asks again. 

All of the collected intelligence has informed the Black Widow that Sophia Ivanovna Drakov is seven years old, but the girl seems small for her age. The records also mention an episode of whooping cough last year – it had progressed far enough to require open heart surgery which had, somewhat more pertinently, been paid for with money from a previously inactive private bank account.

Also of interest: she was born on August 18th, 1997. She weighs 18.5 kilograms, as type-AB blood, speaks English and Russian with some French via a private tutor. If the bedroom’s cluttered bookshelves are to be believed, she also has a penchant for fairy tales and the _Harry Potter_ series.

(And her name originates from the Greek word for wisdom,  _σοφία,_ also the name of an Eastern Orthodox saint who had died of a broken heart while weeping at the grave of her three murdered daughters.)

The girl wears a nightgown with ribbon in the collar, ribbon in the hemline. It makes her look like a frilled pillowcase. Sweat and tears have stuck dark auburn hair against her cheeks. Her right front tooth is missing, and so within her voice there is a slight, reedy sound of whistling.

“Papa said bad people might find us,” Sophia says, finally. “He told me I shouldn’t listen to them.”

“Your father’s a very smart man, Sophia. And you know, you’re very smart too, for being such a good listener. He used to be a soldier, didn’t he?”

(Brash, this mixed use of past and present tense, considering how Ivan Aleksandrovich Drakov’s warm body is currently lying in the master bedroom with a snapped neck. Preliminary scans of the house had told her everyone was asleep, but apparently she had been incorrect on several points.)

But the girl does not know any of this, so she nods.

“And he’s right,” the Black Widow says. “That’s why I’m here – we need to leave soon, before the bad people come. Your father asked me to get you while he and your mother pack up the things they’ll need for your trip.”

“Why? Where are we going?”

“To the safehouse in America. The one your father keeps a picture of, on Lake Jackson? He told me it’s really nice. It has a floating dock you can swim out to, doesn’t it?”  

“Yeah, but Mama says I’m not allowed to go swimming without a life jacket.”

“They’ll have plenty of those there, too.”

Still, Sophia does not move. The time reads 5:47 AM.

The Black Widow reaches forward into that dark, coffin-tight space beneath the bed, and holds out a gloved hand.  

“Your mother and father both need you to be brave right now, Sophia. Can you do that for them?”

Sophia, true to her name, hesitates one more time.

She keeps a clenched fist against her chest for one, two, three beats – what must she be seeing, what must she be thinking about this red-haired woman of nineteen or twenty who has crept through the bedroom door just before dawn? – and then she closes the distance between them.

Their hands clasp in the middle, one around the other. Her bones feel as light and delicate as those of sparrow.

And the girl’s skin is soft beneath the Black Widow’s fingers, so she ghosts them lightly, playfully up the slender arm and smiles. 

Sophia – ticklish, as it turns out, information which had naturally been excluded from the record – giggles through her tears and runny nose. She wriggles out from under the bed in a motion reminiscent of a soldier, crawling under barbed wire. Her curls almost catch on the bedsprings in several places.

Together, they stand up.

“What’s your name, Miss?” Sophia asks. “You didn’t tell me yet. I have two names, you know. _Sophia Ivanovna_. That’s because Papa’s name is Ivan.”

“I’m Natalia,” she answers without pause. “Natalia Alianovna. Or Natasha. Whichever one you like best.”  

“Oh, that’s a pretty name – Miss Natasha, what should I do with my violets? They need me to water them, so I can’t leave them behind. How much did Papa say I could take with me?”

Sophia turns away towards the window. A scar runs from the notch of her collarbone down past the frilled neckline of her nightgown, colored a pale silver-pink like the light that now fills her bedroom as the sun rises.

The Black Widow moves two steps closer and brings a hand against the girl’s forehead.  Both are very quiet for a moment.

The watch reads 5:49 AM.

When slitting a throat – the proper way, they had emphasized during her training, not slicing it as if you were a butcher with his hog – you must stab through the carotid artery and force the blade sideways, cutting off the windpipe and therefore stifling any unnecessary noise. It is clean and efficient and modern, or as clean and efficient and modern as such things can be, and properly done it never fails on the first attempt.

So the knife flashes, only once.

Then Natasha sinks to her knees there in the small, quiet, lighted bedroom, and holds Drakov’s Daughter in her arms as she dies. Blood soaks the front of her suit, her hands, her skin, her long hair, lashing bright red with each convulsion.

(She will cut off her hair after this, and again and again in the years to come with a kind of commemorative regularity.)

In a minute more or so, the body grows still.

But she keeps her face pressed against the child’s shoulder for several minutes longer after that, anyway, until her hitching, heaving, frantic breaths are even again.

“Prasˋtee meeˋnya,” says someone who may once have been her, in a voice that may once have been hers. “Prasˋtee meeˋnya, prasˋtee meeˋnya.”

(She is a sealed bullet, she tells herself. She is an object enclosed in glass. She is self-contained. She is a center of gravity, a place at which the weighted position of her own distributed mass sums to nothing and therefore keeps her upright. She is nobody, nobody, nobody.)  

Eventually, her hands stop trembling.

She gets to her feet once she is certain the legs will bear her weight, and she looks at the body with its unseamed throat.

The ribboned nightgown has been pushed above the knees, while the eyes remain open and staring. She thinks of how there will be cameras when the police and news crews arrive, which will be shortly after the hired help does at 6:15 AM, and how they will capture this for the world to see.

The terms of Drakov’s assassination – or  _executive action_ , as they call it nowadays, because it sounds clean and efficient and modern – had been nonnegotiable, as the terms for defectors usually are. This is meant to be a cancellation of forces, the conclusion of a zero-sum game, and thus: no survivors.

_(“And give it a personal touch, would you?”_ one of them had added.  _“This business has become nothing but long-range rifles and slow-release poisons. It takes no thought. What, you think one way will dirty your hands less than the other? No? Remind yourself what you really are, then. That is what we pay you for.”_ )

She crouches down again.

And she lays Sophia Ivanovna Drakov out on the bed, atop the crumpled sheets, with her nightgown smoothed properly into place and her eyes closed. She draws back the curtains, gives the glass bottle a quarter-turn so that it scatters round flecks of light throughout the room. 

Her footfalls make no sound as she leaves.

Downstairs, the kitchen sink is still running. Water flows into and over a glass coffeepot. All of the kitchen’s countertops are made of a darkly-colored, polished stone, with bright pieces of blue and green laboradorite shining deep inside it. Mrs. Anna Gregorevna Drakov lies sprawled on the floor, blood still spreading away between cracks in the white tile like lines on a city map.

She spends several minutes vomiting into the sink, rinses her mouth out with a glass from the cupboard, and twists off the tap once everything is washed.

The watch reads 6:04 AM. 

Then the Black Widow walks out the way she has come, which is straight down the hallway and across the front threshold. The door locks behind her.

(Isn’t there a superstition, though, about monsters needing to be invited in?)

She moves across the groomed front lawn, her shadow made tall and distinct by the morning sun, and disappears between the trees.

…

_“So Fury isn’t after the monster.”_

_“Not that he’s told me.”_

_“And he tells you everything?”_

…

Natalia, while she is just Natalia, never learns to like Latin. It is dry, humorless, with the duplicitous syntax of a nesting doll, and on top of everything else it is dead.

_Ipso facto._

It makes her think of cold marble columns, laurel wreaths made of beaten gold, blindfolded women holding a set of scales in one hand and a sword in the other. 

(That part seems especially foolish. Shouldn’t you always want to know who you’re killing?) 

One thing Natalia does enjoy, however, is the etymology lessons that sometimes come with it. She likes the idea that words have changed their shapes and sounds throughout history, that whatever meanings they contain are like energy which cannot be lost or destroyed but simply transferred between forms through contact and collision.

Particularly, she likes that English word  _monster._

French,  _monstre._  Italian,  _monstro._  Correct pronunciation requires a certain force with the breath, a biting of the teeth. Its sound is deep and round like a long roll of thunder. It comes from the classical Latin  _mōnstrum_  and the related  _mōnere_ , both of which once meant a warning, a sign, an omen of things to come. Both have also lent their roots to that more instructive and moralizing English word  _demonstrate._

So Natalia understands that monsters, from the beginning, are things meant to be seen rather than heard. They are things to be interpreted and shut up in silence.

(And by the time she has become Black Widow, by the time she has become Natasha, she has learned what this really means.)

…

_“He needs me in a cage.”_

_“No one’s going to put you in a cage –”_

_“Stop lying to me.”_

…

Natasha lies on the floor with shards of broken white porcelain around her. Her gun, meanwhile, sits over in a corner, thrown there because she had discovered it unloaded. There is a smell of rotten flower stems, from the vase which has been knocked off the hotel nightstand – that, at least, can explain the shards. A yellow-tufted tranquilizer dart protrudes from her left thigh.  

She is looking at the man who has come to kill her.

“Black Widow, isn’t it?” he asks. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

He sits in a plush upholstered chair with both feet propped up on the table. A compound bow balances easily across his lap, illumined in lemon-yellow by that floor lamp he’s switched on. He has a square jaw, a clean-shaved face whose age is difficult to guess, sparse brows over pale eyes. The sliding door to her balcony remains open, so that its curtains rise and fall like breaths in the autumn night air. 

On the wall behind him is a painting of two women, standing side by side, their figures done in broad acrylic strokes against a light background.

(She’d tried turning this picture around before going to sleep, but had discovered it to be screwed in place like the mounted television.) 

“I gotta say, the debriefing they gave me really didn’t do you any justice. I must’ve put a good ten milligrams of haloperidol in you before you even started to get cooperative…Oh, hold on.”

He plucks his bowstring before pulling a chunk of beeswax from a flak jacket pocket.

Natasha tries to turn herself over, but her body does not obey this command. She tries again. A leaden heaviness fills her blood, her bones, solidifying within her like prison bars. Black and green spots appear in her vision for a moment.

But perhaps he is not going to kill her outright, Natasha thinks. Perhaps he is going to torture her first. This would not be unexpected or unusual.

(Although  _torture_ , like  _assassination_ , is an outmoded word. It is barbaric, archaic. It conjures the image of ropes and wheels and red-hot irons.  _Enhanced interrogation_  is considered the appropriate term nowadays, free of any undesirable connotation.

Natasha has no doubt it will be replaced by something else within five years, crossing from the quasi-political into the purely satirical:  _alternative methods of persuasion, compelling modes of extraction, rituals of purification_.)

“…Okay, here’s the story,” the man continues. “See if you can follow along without falling asleep on me again.”

Natasha strains to lift an arm. Porcelain shards dig between her shoulderblades. Water from the vase soaks into her shortened hair, through a pajama shirt that she had used to wrap the knives in her suitcase, and it chills the nape of her neck like snow-melt. The spilled flowers are irises, she notices, purple and white, their crushed blooms so extravagantly large they seem almost grotesque.

She swallows a taste of iron shavings in her mouth and stares at the arrows bristling from that quiver on the man’s shoulder.

(And a thought comes to Natasha, then. It hits her between the eyes like a blow and steals away her breath – she does not want to die.)

The man, ignoring this display, runs beeswax up and down the loosened bowstring. He follows afterwards with his fingers, working it into the fiber.

“So this starts as a usual mission, right? I come in here, plug this girl with enough neuroleptics to drop a horse, get ready to finish the job, and you know what? I stop to think – because here’s this talented young individual, one of the best in the world, and with all these skills she’s throwing away on men with egos bigger than their brains and dicks put together. How old are you, twenty-one? Twenty-two? It just seems like kind of a waste.”

Move, Natasha orders herself. Move, move, move. 

She is somehow astonished when her body, which has never yet betrayed her, goes on refusing to answer.

(But she still manages to tighten her fists, the clipped nails forming half-moon crescents in her palms.)

“And that incident with the Drakov family – listen, this is where it gets weird. I was reviewing it, and at first I was thinking how much I wanted to strangle you with my bare hands for that one job alone, but there’s this one detail I can’t let go of. Maybe you can enlighten me.”

He reaches one end of his bowstring and slides the wax back down. It has filled the room with a sharp, floating smell, like extinguished matches, mixed together with the crushed flower petals and the carpet shampoo.

“The daughter. You remember her, right? Sophia. The cops found her lying in bed, did you know that? I’m sure you do. Blood all over the goddamn carpet, but hardly a spot of it on the sheets, which means that whoever’s come in to slit this kid’s throat has taken the time to make her up all decent-like and put her to bed for the night.”

Then he lowers the bow, sets his feet flat on the floor, and leans forward with both elbows rested on his knees. A breeze lifts and lowers the curtains again.

“So I take this detail, I look back over everything, and other stuff starts jumping out. Take Luiz Viera and his wife, for instance. São Paulo, Brazil, 2002 – a member of the governmental commission and his new wife, having afternoon tea on the veranda. Arsenic ends up in the sugar. One point five milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, is that how it’s dosed? Brilliant. Anybody else would’ve put it in the tea. And the husband keels right over, like a good boy, but the wife lives. Apparently someone knew that she always used honey instead.”

By then Natasha is holding her fist so hard that she seems to have a grip around her own pulse, or else there is a doubled fist inside her chest instead of a heart.

(Strength and frailty, a reminder of your own value.)

The man who has come to kill her begins pinching at the softened wax, rolling it between his fingers. The outfit he wears has left his arms bare from the shoulders down, the brachial arteries exposed, which means he is either very reckless or very good at his job.

Going by the conversation thus far, he is both.  

“And then we’ve got hospital fires that only start once the visiting hours are over, car bombs with delayed timers to keep them from going off in the crowded parking garages where they’re supposed to, and stolen research on the Chimera Project’s modified samples of Marburg virus – can I just say  _holy shit,_ by the way? – that somehow get completely wiped from every database instead of just one upstart foreign national’s. Are you finding any of this unusual, yet, Miss? I am.”

Natasha stares at him.

_(“What’s your name, Miss? You didn’t tell me yet.”)_

Each word is thick and heavy, stones in her mouth, but she manages to ask him the question anyway.

“Who sent you?”

He sits back in the chair again. For the first time, Natasha notices a small patch sewn into the Kevlar of his vest. It looks like the outline of an eagle rising on its wings.

“I represent a global espionage and counterterrorism agency called SHIELD. Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division – don’t bother trying to remember that, nobody else can. We monitor potential global threats, which somebody with a larger paycheck than mine has decided includes you. But personally, I think we’d be very fortunate to have a woman with your qualifications on board.”

Natasha is in the midst of counting to slow her breaths – one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three one-thousand, like a child in a thunderstorm – when he says this.

She stops.

“What?”

“Sure. My boss happens to agree with me, if that makes you feel any better. Nick Fury. Crazy son-of-a-bitch, so you two might get along. Don’t tell him I said this, but it’s really not a bad job. Health benefits, travel reimbursement, full citizenship, all that shit. And between us and Sophia Drakov, here’s the clincher – ”

He rises from the chair.

He walks across the carpet to her, shattered pieces of vase and crushed flowers grinding under his feet. He is close enough now that she can see the pupils of his eyes dilate in the shadow. 

She could claw him, maybe, bite his throat if he comes close enough. She is struck by the sudden, vivid memory of a white dancer’s skirt with pleats like the petals of a daisy.

(She does not, does not, does not want to die.)

The man crouches down beside her. He does not reach towards her, hands hanging empty between his legs instead. Then he says:

“ – I promise you will never, ever be made to do something like that again.”

She keeps staring at him.

One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand.

And in a single, titanic burst of effort, Natasha brings up one clenched fist and cracks him across the jaw with it. 

It snaps his head to one side, yes, she hears the sound of it, she feels the energy pass through her stricken muscles into his bones. But he may have been expecting this, because he does not even flinch.

“Otva ˋli,” Natasha says, wishing her mouth was not too dry for spit. “You really think I do things because I’m made do?”

(The possible meanings of that word  _made_  seem to intersect somehow, meeting at a distant point in her mind like the crosshairs inside a rifle scope – from the Old English  _macian_ , meaning to construct, prepare, arrange, transform. Its second, intended definition is a newer derivation.)

The man laughs.

“You know, I think I’ll let you answer that one for yourself.”

He stands up. As an afterthought, he also yanks the tranquilizer dart from her leg – the point is about three inches long and comes out completely clean, bloodless and unbent. The feathered end makes it resemble a bird.

He rubs at his jaw with appreciation, cracks out stiffness in his neck, gathering his bow and quiver before going to stand at the opened balcony door. They are seven stories up.

“Okay, then. I’ll probably be seeing you around, one way or another.” He waves at her. “Good night.”

Then he ducks through the curtains, slaps the screen and the glass doors shut, and he is gone.

Natasha is left listening to the ragged, heaving sounds of her own breath.

That painting of the two women, likely replicated a hundred times over throughout this hotel, stares down at her from the wall. The faces have not been given features, she notes again, an impressionist choice – they are blank, like cloth dolls, the kind you are meant to shove pins into. One of the flower petals has stuck itself to the back of her now-slackened fist.

And the burden is laid down on top of her, its weight replacing the sedative in her blood:

Because she is alive, but – as Natasha discovers – this is suddenly not what she wants, either.  

She does not want this debt, this imbalance of forces. She wants to be alive, but not inside this trapped and motionless body – this body whose various physical parts, fists and heart and head together, have been precisely measured and unmade for the service of others.  

She is the sealed bullet. She is the object in glass. She is self-possessed, self-contained. She is the name,  _natale,_ andshe isthe negation of the name. She is the derivation of an original form. She is nobody, nobody, nobody. 

_(Mōnstrum_ ,  _mōnere_. )  

Then Natasha Romanoff realizes that her face is wet, because it appears she has been weeping stupidly and uselessly for some time now, but it takes another fifteen minutes for the sedative to wear off and so there is nothing she can do about it.

…

_“So I moved on. I focused on helping other people. I was good – until you dragged me back into this freak show and put everyone here at risk. You want to know my secret, Agent Romanoff? You want to know how I stay calm?”_

…

They give Natasha the classified file on Robert Bruce Banner as a formality, considering how she’s read most of it already – or the relevant bits, in her opinion – and has in fact contributed to the portions that required bypassing the security systems of Culver University and General Thaddeus Ross alike. 

She reads through it again on the plane to Kolkata as a courtesy, as something to do with her hands.

It is mostly a disjointed series of articles, lab reports, and newspaper clippings, dated from the time of his accident until the present, details SHIELD has run a sieve through his life to collect.

Banner holds an MA in Biochemistry and a PhD in Nuclear Physics, wrote his doctoral thesis on the genes required for ionizing radiation resistance in  _Saccharomyces cerevisia_  bacteria and its shared homology with human genes  _(“The Path of Yeast Resistance: Human Orthologs and the Future of Radiation Damage Tolerance”)_ , and was born in Dayton, Ohio. He speaks Portuguese, Bengali, and Spanish. He has brown eyes and type-O blood.

(The universal donor, Natasha recalls, but not the universal receiver – that’s type-AB. Transfusions for those with O-blood can only come from a person of the same type. Anything else results in an incompatibility that causes kidney failure, shock, and eventually death.)

But here is the part Natasha has never seen before, here is the part she will carry in her mind afterwards like a striking line of verse:

Because at the very back of the folder, hidden under the other papers, there are notes and records retrieved from a child custody lawyer – typewritten papers sent from pediatricians, it looks like. They detail a lengthy series of contusions and fractures earned falling off his bike, falling out of bed, falling down the stairs, all of it written in that tone of stiff equivocation required for such matters.

(The tone required to say words like  _executive action_  or  _enhanced interrogation_ , as a matter of fact.)

And then there is the picture.

It’s an old Polaroid, the kind that used to make people wait for images and colors to emerge out of its flash-pan white. It has not been dated, although the note  _‘Retrieved– Susan Banner’_ has been written on a plastic tag.

Natasha can guess who it depicts.

He is five or six years old here, and wears a little denim jacket over a screen-print knit shirt. By the tin lunchbox placed at his feet, it may be the first day of school. His curly hair has been combed but is returning to what is likely its usual state of dishevelment. He face is both happy and apologetic, no doubt at being the center of all the morning’s fuss.

He is holding hands with his mother.

The colors have faded so that you cannot precisely tell where his hand ends and hers begins; they blur to form a single gathered fist. Rebecca Banner wears her hair in loose curls, the blue of a patterned house dress offset by potted chrysanthemums and marigolds on the weathered porch steps behind them. She is smiling.

But who took the picture, then, if this is his mother next to him? Natasha flips back several pages to the name and arrest warrant, the asylum admission documentation: Brian Banner, in all probability. 

She looks at the photograph again.

Rebecca Banner’s gaze seems to be aimed just above the camera, which means her smile is directed not at the lens – at whoever will view this photograph afterwards  – but instead at her husband, the man who in several years’ time will smash her head open on an asphalt driveway and kill her while their son Robert Bruce Banner looks on.

(“Robert” is a name from the Old High German  _hrodebert_ , meaning bright and glorious, whereas “Bruce” is Scottish, originally from the French  _Brix_  courtesy of the Normans and meaning “willowlands.” Bright willowlands, then. Like a kindly periphrastic term for the afterlife.)

Natasha closes the file and spends the rest of her journey in silence.

(Almost all of the records pertaining to him are tracked down and destroyed after everything happens – Natasha sees to this task herself, strikes the matches herself – but this photograph is not. She locks it away, in a filing cabinet drawer, and puts the key somewhere she is likely to forget about until the day it is needed.)

…

_“So, this all seems…horrible.”_

_“I’ve seen worse.”_

_“Sorry.”_

_“…No, we could use a little worse.”_

…

There is dust in her lungs, dust on her swollen tongue, dust caught in the action of her pistol as she slides it back to confirm that it is empty.

Natasha keeps herself pressed against the warm stone and waits.

Ten feet or so to her left, afternoon sunlight pours through the gaping hole where a well-thrown punch has blown the wall open. It turns the semi-darkness of the storage room to a deep red, flashing off pieces of steel and glass and metal canisters of cylosarin stacked atop one another like black beetles.

And in another minute, the light is all but blotted out by the presence of a familiar, broad-shouldered shadow.  A heavy breathing fills the reddened-darkened chamber where Natasha now crouches.

But she waits.

(She reprimands herself for this, though. She is the one who had called for him in the first place.)

Coordinates claim she is thirty-six miles northwest of Baghdad, standing in the lately-refurbished and more lately-razed ruins of a chemical weapons complex officially abandoned after the Persian Gulf War.

For the past fifteen minutes, Natasha has listened to the noise of twisting metal and spattering bullets and shouting from outside, listened to that inexhaustible energy change direction through the HYDRA soldiers like the turning path of a storm. Blood on her lip has dried to crumbling black in the heat. Copper wires from the half-broken headset poke at her ear lobe.

(Or maybe she hadn’t called for him, technically. She had gotten only as far as  _“Code Gr – ”_  before the tower guard had so improvidently slammed her head against a steel door and broken off the communication, but it seems this had been enough.)

The darkness expands and contracts, expands and contracts as the shadow stands there, sunlight glancing off his colossal shoulders that rise and fall with each breath.

He seems to be waiting, too.

_“This end of the facility’s secure,”_  Steve’s voice buzzes in her ear. She reaches up to lower the volume.  _“Anybody got a visual on Banner? Can we try bringing him in? Stark?”_

A short, sharp ping, and Stark’s reply comes back.

_“Sorry, little busy disarming the self-destruct security system – unless you want to see what eight hundred tons of mustard agent looks like when you blow it up, that is. Itsy Bitsy, what’s your position?”_

Natasha could tell him that she is gripping an empty pistol in the remains of a munitions storage room at the western section of the compound. She could tell him she is back in the helicarrier’s equipment room again, watching something happen and making promises she will not be able to keep. She might tell him she is within the darkness of her own doubled fist.

_(“I swear, on my life, I will get you out of this. You will walk away, and never have to – ”)_

But what? Never have to what?

Before Natasha can decide on an answer, she watches him stoop his head – it is an oddly deferential action, like a gentleman bowing himself through a low door – and step through that shattered hole in the wall.

One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand.

“Yeah,” Natasha says. “I got him.”  

She holsters her gun and walks forward through the rubble until she is standing in front of him. He sneers but comes no closer.

He - the Other Guy, the Big Guy, because Natasha finds ‘the Hulk’ somewhat disparaging, as though he is a thing - is tall enough that his head rises above the slanted sunlight. His face is featureless in the shadows, except for the eyes with their forward-driving gaze and their hardness like bright flecks inside of dark stone. Sweat runs down his arms. Cords in his neck twitch and strain at sounds she cannot hear. 

Natasha thinks of live wires, exposed nerves, involuntary flinches at the sight of a raised hand, the tension created between will and circumstance.

(They have been working together – if that is the appropriate term – for two months now, but never at these close quarters. Not since that last, first time.)

She sees his hands again, gathered into fists.

They stay the same, Natasha has begun to notice. Through every transformation, although they are approximately the size and weight of iron anvils, the essential shape of his hands stays the same: squared nails and solid fingers, palms roughed to leather by use, strangely deft and economic considering their ferocious potential.

And his eyes, she realizes – maybe it’s a trick of the light, but from where she stands right now his eyes are brown.

_(“Your life?”)_

So Natasha looks down at her own arms, hanging at her sides – she has not raised them above her head in the diplomatic gesture of surrender, because he is not an enemy – and sees that her hands, too, are clenched into fists.

(A good, basic unit for the measurement of self-hood, an understanding of what you have to give if it is asked for.)

She takes off her gloves this time, one-two. 

Then Natasha spreads her fingers and holds the opened hands out to him, pale palms upturned in offering.

“Hey, B – ”

A fatal mid-air mistake, nearly, but she changes direction and goes on.

“—Hey, Big Guy.”

He snorts. Dust whips through the air. Natasha draws her shoulder blades together, bracing herself against the snap of fear that goes through her, and waits again. Nothing else happens.

She thinks next of wax along a bowstring, irises with rotten stems, violets in a glass jar, ribbon in the neckline of a bloodied nightgown. She thinks of two hands merged into one with the passage of time.

_(Mōnstrum, mōnere.)_

“Listen,” she says, “the sun’s starting to get real low. We don’t want to be left out here in the dark, do we? We can go home now. The job’s finished.”

He tilts his head to look down at her.

(All the muscles beneath his skin pull in response to the motion. They are always drawn tight, coils of heavy rope, which is also a way in which the two of them differ from one another; the tension never goes away, of course, but in Bruce it is so practiced and well-disguised that it looks like a sort of withdrawn hesitation.) 

And, lastly, Natasha thinks of herself, ten years old, dressed in white and standing in front of a mirror.

“Here, it’s okay. You can stop,” she says. Her hands remain open, empty. “You can let go now.”

Then, as she will also remember years later, here is what happens next:

He takes a step backwards. His body jerks as though in surprise, as though at the unexpected report of a gunshot. He staggers a second, third, fourth step, sideways out into the afternoon sunlight, one shoulder crumbling dust and stone in his wake. His face is set with pain as he collapses back into himself again.

(If the transformation is a kind of opening-up, she thinks, an unmaking, it would follow that the reverse is a turning of locks, a conservation of energy.)

Natasha follows after him. She has to shield her face from the red, dying light for a moment, which lances through her forehead after sitting for so long in the dark.

When she lowers the hand again, Bruce - just Bruce - lies on his back in the dust.

She takes the final few steps to stand over him.

A pulse is visible in his throat and chest. He keeps his eyes closed and seems to be counting the seconds between each breath, five-one thousands on and off, and it takes another moment for the muscular tremors to stop. 

“Are you all right?” he asks her, in an abraded voice. “I think you were the one who called me.”

“Yes, and yes. Are you?”

Bruce cracks an eye open to look at her, then throws one arm limply across his face and speaks from under the crook of his elbow.

“Oh, you know.” With his other hand, he pulls the torn pants higher above his hips. “Rough day at the office.”

“Tell me about it. I had this guy cornered in the research laboratory when my gun misfired on a squib load. I had to just kick him through the window instead.”  Natasha drops to her knees. “You did well, though. You got me right through the heavy artillery.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s good.” The last of the tension sags out of him when he sighs. He moves his arm away to meet her gaze, now. “But you still shouldn’t have done that.”

Brown eyes, Natasha sees again. She had not been imagining things.

“Done what? Do you remember it?”

Bruce pushes himself up to a sitting position, the expression on his face like someone palpating a wound. Sweat clears tracks through the dust on his forehead and cheeks. The sun has dropped almost below the horizon, lighting up the clouds, and Natasha looks briefly at their long, distorted shadows paired there on the hard-packed earth.

“I remember you, anyway. What you did just now.” Bruce glances over at her, a knot forming between his brows, and glances away quickly. “The directives we agreed on order everybody to keep as clear as possible. You shouldn’t have been so close. He might’ve – I might’ve -  ”

Natasha studies him, this man with several names for whom self-possession and self-containment are tortures carried out in the open, contests he has always won because they have thus far failed to kill him.  

_(Mōnstrum, mōnere.)_

She shrugs.

“I thought it seemed like a waste of energy, waiting for you to pull him back in every time that way. It must be exhausting.”

“Even so – ”

“—And besides, I said I would,” Natasha finishes. “Didn’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

She stands, swatting dust off her knees, and offers him a hand. 

Bruce seizes it by the wrist rather than the fingers, and allows himself to be drawn upright in one smooth pull. Natasha holds on a moment longer than necessary, palm held carefully over his thready pulse.

“I said I’d get you out of this, right?” She lets the hand drop. So does he. “I swore on my life, actually. Maybe it’s not the best thing to swear on, but it’s all I had at the moment.”

“Ah.” Now he looks down at the dust between his bare feet, in that same deferential and bowing motion as before. Sunlight outlines the new-leaf curls of his dark hair. “Yes, I remember that.”

“Well.” Something closes tightly and confidingly around her heart. “I meant it.”

Then Bruce looks up at her again, and meets her eyes, and says:

“I know you did.”

...


End file.
